There is a question that follows us throughout our existence. “Who are we and what does it mean to be human?” The mechanism that pushes human knowledge forward is fuelled by curiosity. Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari brings insights from science and the humanities together to answer the curiosity of what means to be human with his book: “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”.

The book is drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology and economics. The author explores how our cultural history have shaped our human societies and why we engage in certain behaviours the way we do. The book covers sociology, history, anthropology, biology and more, but it’s far more complex than that. It tells the story of how homo sapiens came to be the dominant species on Earth from evolution to present day. This is an ambitious attempt to capture the complexities of human existence, all explained in fine lines of print.

As the book portrays, human history has been shaped by three major revolutions. Firstly, there was the Cognitive Revolution, which happened more than 70,000 years ago. The cognitive revolution allowed humans to maintain free will while creating common systems, such as money, that required only belief in order to be realized. When the Cognitive Revolution occurred, sapiens were able to imagine and describe things which do not exist in the real world. This "fictive language" has enabled all finance, culture, religion, and politics in the millennia since. The ability to believe in an afterlife can lead to a belief in morality, which can lead to a belief in human rights. None of these concepts exist in the natural world, they are all collective imaginations of humanity. Yet they all shape the destiny of our species and our planet, more than our genetic code ever has.